


Draco's War

by LeagueOfWonder



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Families of Choice, HP: EWE, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redeemed Draco Malfoy, Redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:27:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26933584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeagueOfWonder/pseuds/LeagueOfWonder
Summary: Hermione rarely said the word Malfoy. Harry and Ron still used it sometimes, in public or to tease him. But with Hermione, Draco suspected it had been years since the word ever passed her lips. He had asked her about it, once.“Did you know that in French, your name means bad faith?Mal foi.Mauvaise foi.”Draco nodded.“You aren’tmal foi.”
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy/Ron Weasley, Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	Draco's War

“The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_

*

Draco was standing against the wall, hands shaking. Ron was yelling. He did that sometimes, usually over little things that never mattered. The dishes in the sink. The leak in the living room ceiling. The others would calm him down. Harry would laugh at him and Hermione would argue half-heartedly and then tire of it and hug him and peck him with feather-light kisses until he couldn’t take it anymore and would grasp her face in his hands and kiss her hard and full-on. 

Harry had told him once that Ron yelled because he had grown up one of seven children and sometimes yelling was the only way anyone heard you in the Burrow. Draco understood, but he hadn’t said: my parents never yelled until Voldemort stayed in the Manor. Then, my father would yell at me until he was hoarse with it and the Death Eaters standing by watching would laugh at me. It was a kindness. If my father didn’t yell, someone else would whisper _crucio_ as punishment for my mistakes. He didn’t say any of that, he simply nodded at Harry and said he understood, and Harry and Hermione usually handled it without a problem. But they were gone for the day and it was just Draco and Ron.

Draco thought of Harry and Hermione with Ron and found himself a wholly inadequate substitute. He couldn’t do any of those things. He kept his face pointed carefully at the wooden floor, examining each individual beam. They were hand-cut. Maybe oak? Draco wasn’t sure.

The yelling was still going on and Draco could feel his heart speeding up. His hands were beginning to shake uncontrollably and his lungs felt sore and swollen in his ribcage. Ron hadn’t turned around. Ron was so loud. It was all so much. Draco leaned back against the wall. He slid slowly down to the floor and looked at the cabinets across from him. Cheap, laminate. Serviceable. There was a crack between the floor and the cabinets. 

The yelling stopped abruptly. Draco looked up and realized there were tear tracks on his face.

“Fuck, Draco.” Ron kneeled next to him. “Draco.” Ron said again. He still looked angry. His hand was in a fist. Draco flinched back. 

Ron visibly calmed himself. He unclenched his fist. He held out his hand. Draco took it after a second’s hesitation. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ron said. “I would never hurt you.”

“Okay.” Draco’s voice was small and he didn’t say that he hadn’t thought Ron would hurt him. 

“I would never hurt you. I’m sorry I yelled. I’m really sorry I yelled. I should have thought.”

“Okay.”

Ron sighed, putting his free hand over his face. “Just— Come here. Please.” He opened his arm. Draco shifted into Ron’s chest. He was still shaking, he realized, small tremors quaking his hands and his chest.

Ron rubbed his back, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Draco tucked his face into Ron’s neck. “You sound like a broken record.”

Ron paused. “Who taught you what a record was?”

*

Hermione was on the far edge of the bed, her dark skin lit by the moon at the window. Draco was next to her, his arm stretched over her chest. He was flicking her nipple idly. Harry still had come covering his stomach and Ron was just beginning to fall asleep half on top of Harry before he shoved Ron off with a grumbled “how can your shoulder be so pointy?” Ron hummed sleepily in reply. 

Draco opened his mouth, closed it. Hermione was beginning to drift off, her eyes blinking slowly.

“I was thinking of changing my name,” Draco said.

Hermione’s eyes flew open. “Your last name?”

Hermione rarely said the word Malfoy. Harry and Ron still used it sometimes, in public or to tease him. But with Hermione, Draco suspected it had been years since the word ever passed her lips. 

He had asked her about it, maybe a year ago, maybe more. She had been cleaning the dishes at the time. She had paused, her hands still wet and soapy. 

“Did you know that in French, your name means bad faith? _Mal foi_. _Mauvaise foi_.”

Draco nodded. 

“You aren’t _mal foi_.”

Draco had gripped the countertop so hard his knuckle cracked and left the kitchen. He sat in the old chair in the attic next to the window. He cried. 

So this was what forgiveness felt like, he had thought, and looked out the window to the ocean’s waves flinging themselves endlessly into the ground.

Draco shifted in the bed, feeling Harry’s arm tighten around his hips and Hermione’s body tensing from its relaxed laziness next to him.

Ron’s head poked up from behind Harry’s, waiting for the answer.

Draco shifted uncomfortably. Harry tightened his grip, supportive. Draco tried to relax.

“Yeah. It hasn’t felt right lately.”

Hermione didn’t react for a few moments, long enough for Draco to start to get nervous.

Finally, she opened her mouth. “What do you want to change it to?”

Draco paused again. “I don’t want it to be wizarding.”

“Go on,” she said. 

“You can say no.”

Hermione turned.

“I was thinking of Granger.” He rushed to add, “But it doesn’t have to be. It was just an idea.”

Hermione still hadn’t reacted. “Why Granger?”

“I don’t want it to have centuries of terror and cruelty behind it,” Draco paused, “And any wizarding name does.”

“Why Granger?”

“I want it to be the name of someone I love. I want my name to come from love.”

Hermione turned on her side and looked at his eyes, her soft brown looking searchingly into his hard grey. Doubt began to creep in. Maybe he should never have asked. Maybe he should have just continued feeling wrong, misplaced in his own name. Draco could feel a hole beginning to open in his chest, or perhaps one he hadn’t realized was there began to widen. 

“Shall we file the papers tomorrow?” she asked. Ron whooped and fell of the bed. Hermione leaned in to kiss Draco fiercely, teeth nipping at his smiling lips, Harry’s warmth at his back. The hole disappeared as if it was never there.

Draco thought of who he had been, how he used to sneer Hermione’s name as if it was a dirty word for never having belonged to a wizard before her. Now, he liked the idea. How far I’ve come, he had thought the first time he kissed Hermione, a tentative, hopeful thing made all the more heart-wrenchingly terrifying by the thought that he should be disgusted by the act.

Sometimes, he worried that this whole life he’s created isn’t real. That it’s an elaborate way to prove to himself, to the world even, that he’s changed. That he is no longer the Draco Malfoy who had knelt before the Dark Lord with fear in his heart and endured the Dark Mark engraving itself on his inner arm. 

But these thoughts were best left unexamined, so he would stop and take a walk, or work in the garden, or read. He had his own few shelves of books in the living room, while Hermione had the rest. He looked curiously at the Muggle books in Hermione’s section one day and found _Eichmann in Jerusalem_ amongst the shuffle of novels and poetry and nonfiction, filed innocuously under Arendt between _I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings_ and _Metaphysics_. He sat down and read it all at once, in one great gasp that left him pale and sweating in Hermione’s chair in the living room. He took it to the attic with him and read it again the next day, and a third time. On the fourth day, Harry came home at lunch and took the book, half-read, from Draco’s hands with a quiet “enough.” 

Draco went to the Muggle bookshop in town the next day, feeling ridiculous in Harry’s worn jeans with holes in the knees and one of Ron’s incomprehensible black shirts with the name of some musical group that Hermione had laughed at and called “punk.” All the same, he took quiet pleasure in pulling them on that morning, in Ron’s appreciative gazes and Harry’s short wolf whistle. He liked the feeling of being surrounded by his loved ones, surrounding himself with their presence during his day.

A bell above his head chimed as he pushed the door open, tentatively stepping foot inside the cramped space. Books lay in stacks on rows on columns, precariously perched against shelves brimming full. Draco idly wondered if lighting a joint would set the whole thing on fire in a feat of spontaneous combustion. 

The woman at the counter was speaking with another customer, so Draco waited until she finished, heartbeat slightly raised as he surveyed the unfamiliar environment. He could feel his wand hidden in his pocket, pressed against his thigh, and tapped it with his index finger for a moment before stepping up to the counter.

The woman—brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin, Draco was struck for a moment by the quiet realization, one of those ones that everyone always knows and doesn’t think twice about until they hit their mid-twenties and re-examine the way the world is set up, that wizards and Muggles look identical, couldn’t put them in a line and tell them apart if you tried, that the fear in a Muggle’s eyes when you put a wand to their throat was the same as the fear in a wizard’s, that their happiness and laughter was identical, beautiful, remarkably unmagical while being magical all the same, and Draco remembered that if he had met this woman at sixteen, he might have been forced to kill her, but would it be force? if his father had said, “this is your duty to your family” and pointed the way, would he have done it? would he have killed this woman? who looks just the same as any witch and whose laughter might sound just like Hermione’s when Harry trips over his own feet, that helpless “I’m trying not to laugh at you and be empathetic because that did look like it hurt but you’re making it very difficult for me” laugh that makes Draco fall in love with them both all over again—the woman, the woman, she smiled and said, “What can I do for you?”and Draco smiled back and said “I’m looking for books about the Holocaust? During the… Second World War? And, also, actually. Maybe one on the First, as well? I’m assuming there is a first?”

She laughed, “Yes, there is a First World War. Let me show you around,” and Draco thought that really, her laugh wasn’t like Hermione’s at all, but that was okay, it was a nice laugh anyway.

*

Draco was ensconced in the armchair by the window when Harry arrived home. Draco always said he liked to read by windows. It was nice to look up occasionally and be reminded of the great, wide world outside of your little one, your book and your chair. There was a stack of books beside him, piled up to nearly the height of the chair’s armrest and Harry smiled fondly at the sight. Draco hardly noticed Harry’s entrance into the room, and only managed to hum absentmindedly in reply when Harry asked what he was reading.

In fact, Draco only registered that Harry had arrived when he finished the book, the first of many the Muggle shopkeeper had furnished him with. He trailed into the kitchen, slowly noticing the dark windows, his dinner plate still steaming lightly under the heating charm on the counter. He picked up his plate, still slightly in a haze, and walked adagio up the stairs to the bedroom. 

He was greeted by the sight of his three favourite people, asleep wrapped around each other. The bed was big, but not quite big enough for all four of them, although Draco noticed it seemed the perfect size for three. A brief hollow in his chest opened, the reoccurring one that felt like a sinkhole that gaped every so often, more and more these days. He smiled faintly and continued into the attic, carefully levitating his plate as he climbed the ladder into the space that he had marked out as his long before any of the others had so much as looked twice at him, let alone moved in. 

When Hermione woke drowsily in the early hours before dawn, she found Draco still missing, but the soft sound of his snoring drifted lazily down from the attic. 

*

Draco spent his days reading his books. Sometimes, he would take breaks to work in the garden. 

Over dinner one night, Hermione commented, “Did you know the little purple flowers are weeds?” 

“Yes,” Draco replied. “I think they’re pretty.”

Sometimes, the books were too much. When Ron and Harry and Hermione were at work, he would read and then cry until he could barely cry anymore. He thought of having the shape of flowers carelessly tucked into a kimono one morning burned into skin, indelibly, in the first moment of the nuclear age. He thought of walking through masses of people, made low and sick by an unspeakable horror—their lives torn from them in a moment of great anonymity by a man who named his plane after his mother. Draco thought of what Enola Gay must think of her son, how proud she must have been as he killed so many in her name. He thought of Narcissa Black drinking mint tea in the garden and saying, so delicately, a carefully planned afterthought, “Your father and I expect the best from you.” He thought of running to his mother and hugging her around the knees as a child.

Other times, he had to put his book down and lay down on the hard floor and look up at the ceiling. He felt empty inside, like his brain had been filled up with lies and now it was being washed clean. Sometimes, his breath would pick up and he would lay there gasping on the floor like a beached whale trying to get enough air, the hard wood digging into his shoulder blades. He would read like that off and on, holding his book up above his head until his arms got tired and it felt like there was no blood left in them. He would let his book collapse back onto his chest and think unpleasant thoughts about the world and feel helpless to stop any of the wrongs in it.

Hermione came in once while he was on the floor. She sat primly in his recently vacated armchair and read all of the back covers of the books piled next to it. When she finished the last, she restacked them exactly as he had them, and then come over and straddled his hips with a smile on her face.

Draco pretended to ignore her, though he lost his focus completely. She ground against his crotch until he felt rock hard in his trousers. Finally, when she began to undo her skirt, he dropped his book and grasped her hips. Vaguely, in the back of his mind, he wondered whether this was a reward for good behaviour.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil_ by political theorist Hannah Arendt is an account of the 1960 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal who was responsible for orchestrating the logistics of the Holocaust. Arendt argues that Eichmann is neither insane, nor a sociopath (in fact, the six psychiatrists who interviewed him before the trial found that he was more normal than the typical person). He had no particular hatred of Jews. Instead, he was a conformist, a “joiner.” Arendt believes that the terrifying nature of totalitarianism is that ordinary people can participate in, even facilitate, some of the most inhumane and egregious crimes ever committed without guilt. This book details real and horrifying events and analyses human nature’s response. I encourage everyone to read it. You can see how (fictional) Draco would have seen a sickening version of himself in Eichmann.  
> The original, shorter report on the trial (the origins of the book) can be found here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/02/16/eichmann-in-jerusalem-i
> 
> The book Draco read that talked about the shape of flowers being burned into some women from the atomic bomb is a detail mentioned in the book _Hiroshima_ by American journalist John Hersey which you can read in full here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima


End file.
